Diamonds Aren't Black
by mgcrtr
Summary: Lin was a late bloomer to earth bending, and Toph didn't hesitate to show her daughter some tough love.


**Disclaimer: Not mine**

_A/N: How I believe Lin must've grown up, a late bloomer and some tough love from mother._

...

Diamonds Aren't Black

...

Toph gave birth on Appa, flying to some city that was celebrating Team Avatar, again. She screamed at Aang and Sokka instead of screaming in pain. When Lin popped out crying, Toph dropped her on slaughter of threats towards the boys; her body sagged, exhausted, spent.

"She's small."

The kid wailed.

Toph reached out at Katara's voice. "Give her here."

"Toph, she's really small."

"That's what happens when you tell a pregnant woman to fly blind on a bison! The baby pops out premature. Now give." She wiggled her fingers

"That never happened to Katara."

"No one asked you, Sokka!" Toph listened to her daughter's screams.

"Don't hurt her."

Toph flinched as the bundle settled into her hands, blanket. Not baby touching her skin. "Whose blanket is that?"

"Mine," Aang said.

"It better not be infected. If you kill my kid…"

"It's not. I swear - Don't give me that look!"

"Aang, we should probably drop down, the air here…"

Toph tuned out their voices. She listened to her child's wails. Tried to shush her, with that shushing sound she'd heard Katara and Suki make around their kids, heard Aang and Sokka make. It didn't work. Lin cried.

Smooth skin suddenly touched Toph. Baby smooth skin. Toph barely kept from flinching back. She hadn't seen that coming. Tiny fingers, tiny-tiny fingers wrapped around her pointer finger, and Toph's daughter quieted.

"Katara," Toph said. "Katara!"

"What?"

"Can she… Can she see?"

"Yes."

But she couldn't bend.

...

When Lin was three, and Toph didn't think she'd remember anything, Toph mentioned to Katara that she wouldn't want to see if it meant giving up her bending.

It wasn't that Toph didn't love her daughter, because she did, but sometimes, in the very back of her mind, Toph had wanted her daughter to carry on the Beifong legacy.

...

When Lin found words, she used them to describe every scene she saw to her mother. In exquisite detail. Half the time Toph never bothered to listen to the list of colors she didn't know or comparisons to colors she didn't understand either. Lin blathered on contently to her half-listening mother about colors and shades and textures and tints and shadowing and lighting and...

"Mom," Lin asked, wide-eyed (probably, Toph couldn't actually see), and twelve or something. "Is your darkness like diamonds?"

"What?"

"Dense and impenetrable? Because that's what black is like. If that's what you see, then you're seeing black. And yellow, yellow is like clay, fluffier and bright and stuff."

"The sun is yellow?" Toph tried to recall from a different day.

"Yes!"

"You're telling me the sun is made up of clay?"

"No, just, it's like clay…"

"The sun isn't clay."

"I know it's not!" Lin stomped her foot hard into the ground, sent the vibrations all through Toph. "But I'm trying to make you see!"

"I appreciate the effort, Lin, but the sun isn't clay."

Discussion over.

...

"And she was trying to tell me diamonds are like darkness!" Toph complained to Katara.

"Diamonds?"

"Yeah, trying to tell me that black is dense like them."

"Diamonds aren't black."

"Whatever. It doesn't matter anyway. Blind girl here."

"Diamonds don't look dense."

Toph snorted. "Yeah they are."

Katara didn't say anything for a long time, and Toph frowned, having to relocate Katara to make sure she hadn't left. When the waterbender spoke again, Toph tensed at the hesitancy in her voice. "Have you ever mentioned diamonds' density to Lin?"

"No, but why does that-" Toph's heart jumped to her throat.

...

Two days later, Lin bended a chunk of earth at Toph's head in retaliation for not being allowed to stay out late.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Toph asked (the curfew argument finished).

Lin shifted on the ground. "It's not fair to have both earth and sight."

"A lot of people do."

"Not the Beifongs. It's one or the other."

Toph reached out, and a lock of Lin's hair appeared under her hand. "Not anymore," Toph said.

"But you said –"

Toph cuffed her daughter alongside the head. "I say a lot of things. I better see you in the beginner class tomorrow."

"But Mo-o-om, those are all the babies!"

"Tough."

...

A week later, Toph listened in on Lin's conversation (she probably shouldn't have listening) with Kya about cute boys.

Three days after that, Toph caught the accelerated heart beats of her daughter and Tenzin _kissing_.

Toph put a blind fold on Lin and took away her shoes. It was time for an accelerated earth bending course since Lin wasn't taking the other one seriously (and it would also be good punishment for trying to sneak around Toph, the Avatar's alarm system for intruders for months. Who was really that stupid?)

Lin scowled and cursed and tried to throw earth rubble at her mother at her new found blindness, but had absolutely no control to even so much as scrape the master earth bender. "What did I even do?"

"You were born," the loving mother seethed back. "Now see what I see."

"How am I supposed to do that? I'm fucking blind now."

Toph grinned and watched her daughter fumble in her attempt to storm out of the room. She called after her preteen, "Oh how will you be able to find Tenzin's mouth now?"

It took three weeks without seeing (though Toph's pretty sure Lin cheated or it would've been sooner), before Lin learned to bend, truly bend, feel the earth and understand its _life. _

_...  
_

Toph only ever met three people in her entire life who could lie to her. Her daughter was one of them, though Toph never admitted it aloud (not even to Aang).

She realized it when she grilled Lin on what she'd been up to (when Toph knew perfectly well Lin had not been with Aang – who had tried to lie for Lin but failed miserably – but rather sneaking around with one of the fire nation kids Zuko had brought with him.) Lin had told her mother, flat to her face, feet firmly planted on the ground that she and Aang had made sculptures; one of the rock formations had been of Tenzin being attacked by Bumi.

It had felt true. It had sounded true.

It wasn't true.

Toph tugged Lin by her hair into a cave, collapsed a chunk of mountain on her and made her earth bend her way out as punishment. It took about three days.

Apparently, Lin had lied on a multitude of separate occasions without the master earth bender knowing.

Apparently, Lin had felt horrible every time.

Apparently, Lin hadn't felt horrible enough to not lie again.

The next time Toph caught Lin lying (The sixteen year old claimed to have finished all her earth bending exercises, but Toph caught Tenzin trying to cover up for her.), mother and daughter confronted each other at the newly built Air Temple in Republic City.

Toph lashed out with metal hand cuffs, and Lin bent them back to Toph.

They uprooted more than half the island before the Avatar forced his way between the fighting Beifongs.

Toph refused to live in the same dwelling as her daughter for three months; she left Lin at the Air Temple. Neither apologized for the fight, Lin just returned home. Toph always figured it was with prompting from Aang. The Avatar always wanted peace.

...

Toph knew the moment Lin and Tenzin called it quits, because Lin came home sobbing and trying to lie to her (but Lin was too much of a sobbing mess to lie to Toph correctly). Toph told her daughter to toughen up. "There are more fishies in the seas."

At midnight, Toph burrowed her way into Tenzin's room. She exploded from the ground, a blast of rocks. He jumped from sleep, screaming. Toph, to say the least, did enough to scare the _spirits_ out of him. Like any good mother after a boy broke her daughter's heart should.

Before Aang or Katara arrived to see what the trouble was, Toph had already put the floor back neatly where it belonged and headed back home to where her earth bending, color loving daughter who Toph loved awaited.

Not that old, shuffling Toph ever admitted to loving the few times Lin still tried to explain scenes to her with colors.

...

_Ende._


End file.
